In the absence of 2.0mm Karis M at the Nexy store, I re-rubbered my main M8 blade with a fresh STN sheet on FH (same as before – I'm going to transfer the used FH sheet to my other M8 blade that has Spinlord Keiler 1.8mm medium pips on BH) and DHS Skyline 3-60 Soft 2.1mm on BH.

So this was mainly to try out the Skyline 3-60 Soft. I put 4 hours into it yesterday. Still adjusting to it. It sounds great on fast impact. Short game control is really nice. But my practice partners seemed to find it fairly easy to return my BH drives and topspins, compared with Aurus Soft 1.9 or even Mark V 1.8. I'll need to try it in some matches this week. Maybe it's better as a FH rubber, but that spot is taken…

_________________"Once you get past a certain threshold, everyone's problems are the same: fortifying your island and hiding the heat signature from your fusion reactor." –Doctor Impossible

Getting more comfortable with the Skyline 3-60 Soft on the backhand after a couple of pennant nights and another 4 hours of practice. I think I'm giving up a little top-end snap, but the trade-off is that a) BH topspins and put-aways are relatively reliable; and b) impact sounds much harder/more impressive than it really is, because the rubber is so loud. I think this might be beneficial because of the psych-out factor, but OTOH an opponent might think "wow, that was a cracking backhand, and I just returned it!"

_________________"Once you get past a certain threshold, everyone's problems are the same: fortifying your island and hiding the heat signature from your fusion reactor." –Doctor Impossible

Now and then I pick up a bat with all-round non-tensioned rubbers, and I don't mind how it plays in casual hitting or practice loops. One of my teammates recently returned to the sport with 20-year-old Mark V on a Stiga Offensive Classic, and has just bought…new sheets of Mark V. And he does pretty well.

Has anyone here abandoned glue-effect rubbers and gone back to Sriver/Mark V/Mendo/729FX/etc?

It is easy to get addicted to the catapult effect of tensor rubbers but to be able to fully control them in actual match play is not always so easy for club players.

Last summer in practice and casual play I was having great fun using Xeon Vega Europe and elite on my faster TSP balsa blades but then when league started it was another story as at faster venues the ball would often just fly long on chops, blocks etc.

So I switched to much underated Xiom Musa and suddenly keeping the ball in play just became easy and natural. Definitely a good all-round euro type rubber for taming fast blades and very good value. However that temptation to try another sheet of Xiom Vega just won't fully​ go away.

I was also going to suggest Musa as a good change-up from Mk V. Seems quite powerful especially on a balsa blade, from my limited experience.

Another interesting BH rubber is DHS Gold Arc III. Chinese sponge and Japanese topsheet, it's one of the softest DHS rubbers I've tried, and retains a lot of the traditional DHS traits. Again, not used it a lot, but it does seem to slot between a fast tensor and a slower classic rubber. Can be pricey though.

I picked up some Friendship 802 OX short pips to test out for a potential hardbat pennant competition I was thinking of running.

Threw them on my Matsushita pro special blade, and gave them a bit of a hit to see whether they would be suitable for the competition - I didn't want anything that spun too much or wobbled either - just a fairly normal hardbat.

Bottom line - I ended up enjoying myself so much playing hardbat that I'm actually using them in preference to my "normal" combination bat at the moment!

Still on an all-wood blade, the discontinued BTY Chuan Chih-Yuan, which is a little thinner and faster than the Sanwei M8. The bottom part of the CCY blade face tapers noticeably more than my M8 or WSC blades so, unfortunately, if a rubber starts its life on the CCY, I can't use it on one of the other blades later.

I had a sheet of T25 on the CCY forehand, but replaced it with Karis M after about a week. This is because I put the T25 into a corner of the table on its third day of use, gouging a nice hole in it, as you do with expensive rubbers. A strip began peeling off the nearby edge a couple of days after that. So now I have Karis M on both sides.

Is Karis M anything like Mark V? I had Mark V on the M8 for some months. Bearing in mind that I'm using Karis on a slightly faster blade, and that it's 2.0mm vs the Mark V's 1.8mm – no, I don't find them similar. The Karis is a lot quicker and feels harder on impact. On the BH, hitting control is more accurate (for me) than with glue effect rubbers – one thing I immediately liked about it. In this respect, and to some extent in passive returns that don't catapult like glue effect rubbers, the Karis is comparable to Mark V, but Karis is a brisk 5K runner to the Mark V's casual round-the-block sweatpants-wearing jogger. Would a faster grade of Mark V, like HPS, be anything like Karis? I probably won't be finding out for myself.

_________________"Once you get past a certain threshold, everyone's problems are the same: fortifying your island and hiding the heat signature from your fusion reactor." –Doctor Impossible

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